WhetPhish Posted September 16, 2010 Share Posted September 16, 2010 Hi, My laptop is an Advent 7104 with the following specs, and I have been having some trouble getting Mac OS to boot after installation: CPU: Intel Pentium M 735 1.70Ghz Chipset: Intel i915GM RAM: 1.5GB DDR2 Optical: Philips DVD±RW SDVD8820 Hard Disk: 40GB Hitachi HTS421240H9AT00 LAN: Realtek 8139/810X WiFi: Intel Pro 2200BG Sound: Conexant AC-Link Graphics: Intel 910GL I started off with the iATKOS S3 V2 DVD which booted fine but after partitioning the disk and trying to exit Disk Utility it would hang (beachball forever). After a reboot it would pretend to be installing on the new partition but the hard disk light just stopped and it stayed like that. I swapped the hard disk into another laptop which I knew worked okay with Leopard and installed SL from the iATKOS disc. When I swapped the hard disk I got the dreaded "Still waiting for root device ...". I tried everything from rd=disk0s1 to rd=disk3s3 (one at a time) and with the platform=X86PC and platform=ACPI options as well as with combinations of -x and -f but still had the same message. I checked the laptop hard disk and it was set to master. After this I thought I would try Leopard and managed to install iDeneb v1.4 (Mac OS 10.5.6) without any problems on another laptop hard disk (trying to rule everything out). Again I got the same error message and none of the boot options made any difference. My question is - can I try an alternative IDE driver, and if so how would I get PC-EFI to load it before it boots Mac OS? I might be barking up the wrong tree here but if I can install Mac OS on a hard disk in a cut down install-only mode it says to me that, somewhere, Mac OS has a driver that likes my hard drive/controller! Thanks in advance, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhetPhish Posted September 22, 2010 Author Share Posted September 22, 2010 Okay, I've now got iDeneb v1.4 installed okay, but I can only boot using the DVD (with rd=disk0s1 as the option). If I try to boot from the hard disk I get the 'Still waiting for root device' error. This makes me think that the install DVD has something on it kext-wise that is different to that of the hard disk. When I do a -x as the boot option it loads kexts before it starts trying to boot the OS. Which kexts does the bootloader load, and which does Mac OS X itself load? Is there a newbie guide for this? I don't mind playing around adding and taking away kexts but I need some pointers as to how to do this. Help .... please! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhetPhish Posted September 27, 2010 Author Share Posted September 27, 2010 This has taken me a long time to resolve, but the problem was that the ICHx chipset driver wasn't loaded (I was under the impression that it was SATA only). A reinstall with this driver gets around the 'still waiting for boot device issue', but I still have other problems booting. When I have worked it all out I will post a guide. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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